The increasing development of digital video technology presents an ever increasing problem of reducing the high cost of video compression codecs and resolving the inter-operability of equipment of different manufacturers. To achieve these goals, the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) created the ISO/IEC international Standards 11172 (1991) (generally referred to as MPEG-1 format) and 13818 (1995) (generally referred to as MPEG-2 format). One goal of these standards is to establish a standard coding/decoding strategy with sufficient flexibility to accommodate a plurality of different applications and services such as desktop video publishing, video conferencing, digital storage media and television broadcast.
Although the MPEG-1 and 2 standards have proven to be very successful, ISO/SG29/WG11 is focusing on the next-generation of audiovisual multimedia coding standard known as MPEG-4. MPEG-4 intends to provide an audiovisual coding standard that allows for interactivity, high compression, and/or universal accessibility, with high degree of flexibility and extensibility. One goal is to provide a very low bit rate video coding scheme.
Very low bit rate video coding has received considerable attention in academia and industry in terms of both coding algorithms and standards activities. In addition to the earlier ITU-T efforts on H.320 standardization for video conferencing from 64 kbps to 1.544 Mbps in ISDN environment, the ITU-T/SG15 has now formed an expert group on low bit coding (LBC) for visual telephony below 64 kbps. The ITU-T/SG15/LBC development consists of two phases: the near-term and the long-term. The near-term standard H.324, based on existing compression technologies, mainly addresses the issues related to visual telephony at below 28.8 kbps, the V.34 modem rate used in the existing Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). H.324 has been adopted as an ITU-T standard. The long-term standard H.324/L, relying on fundamentally new compression technologies with much improved performance, will address video telephony in both PSTN and mobile environment.
Therefore, a need exists in the art for an apparatus and method for coding motion video that will produce very low bit rate video representation and communications, which is appropriate for both MPEG-4 and H.324/L.